Response-time enhancement of a hybrid controller of unmanned aerial vehicles using parametrization

Unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs perform missions that require precise, fast, and robust maneuvers regardless of the external environmental disturbances. Simple controllers are not adequate enough to meet these constraints. Thus more accurate and complex controllers can be used, however, these complex controllers constitute high computational complexity calculations which deplete the UAV’s battery more quickly and affect the duration of the conducted missions. In this paper, we propose to apply a parameterization technique to efficiently simplify the calculations of a complex hybrid controller, while preserving the accuracy. By parameterizing the control trajectory of the UAV, we can represent the control signals using fewer number of parameters, an idea that is similar to signal down sampling. We evaluated the proposed parameterization technique on four different reference trajectories with three different solvers. The results show that the parameterization introduces a speed-up of 40% with no practical effect on the controller performance and accuracy.